Increasingly, enterprises are looking for ways to simplify access and organization of Information Technology (IT) services. One mechanism for providing such IT simplification is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Application of SOA principles promises faster development cycles, increased reusability and better change tolerance for software components.
Unfortunately, enterprises that implement SOA often find that the start-up complexities of SOA delays, if not derails, the expected return on investment. While SOA simplifies the complexity of an IT environment, organizations lack sufficient experience with SOA technology required for a quick, trouble-free implementation. Compounding this experience gap, graphical tools for implementing SOA are not readily available, so that data services for use in SOA environments often must be hand-coded.
One area in the enterprise-class portal and Web applications areas that receives significant developer time and attention, for example, is the perceived need to keep response times for user applications to a minimum. From the point-of-view of a user, the service must perform at or near the level of native access mechanisms. Accordingly, there is an ongoing need for improved techniques for reducing lag time between when a request is issued and when information is returned.